The sultry summer months along the Gulf Coast and East Coast are a time of volatile weather as warm ocean water fuels storms, some just bringing rain and some growing into fierce tropical storms and hurricanes.

Optimizing economic welfare without constraints might put human well-being at risk, a new climate study argues. While being successful in bringing down costs of greenhouse gas reductions for instance, the concept of profit maximization alone does not suffice to avoid the tipping of critical elements in the Earth system which could lead to dramatic changes of our livelihood. The scientists use mathematical experiments to compare economic optimization to the governance concepts of sustainability and the more recent approach of a safe operating space for humanity. All of these turn out to have their benefits and deficits, yet the profit-maximizing approach shows the greatest likelihood of producing outcomes that harm people or the environment.

A massive world-wide study of dry riverbeds has found they’re contributing more carbon emissions than previously thought, and this could help scientists better understand how to fight climate change.

The next 10 years will be critical for the future of Antarctica, and choices made will have long-lasting consequences, says an international group of award-winning Antarctic research scientists in a paper released today. It lays out two different plausible future scenarios for the continent and its Southern Ocean over the next 50 years.

Kansas State University researchers are turning up the heat on wheat to prove the point that higher nighttime temperatures may be to blame for significant yield and quality losses in the crop.

Seagrass meadows on the west coast of Vancouver Island store substantially less carbon than seagrass sites in other parts of the world, according to a new study by Simon Fraser University and Parks Canada researchers.

Climate change is forcing fish species to shift their habitats faster than the world’s system for allocating fish stocks, exacerbating international fisheries conflicts, according to a study led by a Rutgers University–New Brunswick researcher.

NASA satellite imagery captured Tropical Storm 07W soon after it developed near Kadena Air Base on the island of Okinawa, Japan in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. 

Storm-driven ocean swells have triggered the catastrophic disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves in recent decades, according to new research published in Nature today.

A mile south of Yosemite National Park, fire ecologist Chad Hanson strides through the Stanislaus National Forest, heading to a great gray owl nest he found earlier this spring. Genetically distinct from its cousins in western North America, these rare birds are 2 feet tall, with a wingspan of about 5 feet. They can be seen almost any time because, unlike most owls, they are active day and night.